The SAP ECC to S/4HANA Accelerator: architecture and benchmarks

Executive summary

SAP ECC to S/4HANA migration assessments are conventionally slow and manual: consultants review ABAP code by hand, run ad-hoc SQL for data profiling, and produce spreadsheet-based complexity matrices that cannot be re-run as the source system evolves. Master data quality issues — duplicate customers, overlapping vendors, inconsistent GL structures — are typically discovered late, when remediation is most expensive.

The accelerator is a high-performance C++ system that scans, profiles, and generates migration artifacts for S/4HANA transitions in a single run. In PDI internal benchmarks on an 8-core, 256 GB Azure instance with 2 TB SSD, it processed 1 billion lines of ABAP and 100 million data rows in under 30 minutes. It uses advanced mathematical algorithms to assess master-data duplicate risk and indicate whether a separate MDM workstream may be required; it does not implement or deliver MDM. It also outputs SQLScript, CDS views, or Migration Cockpit specifications from one shared parse.

The problem

Repeatability

Manual assessment work cannot be economically repeated. When the source system changes between assessment and cutover — and it always does — the complexity picture goes stale. An engine-driven assessment re-runs in minutes.

Data blindness

Data profiling and identity resolution are usually treated as separate workstreams rather than integrated inputs to migration design, so duplicate master data surfaces during UAT instead of during planning.

Format lock-in

Most tooling generates one output format. If the project shifts from SQLScript direct load to Migration Cockpit staging, assessment work is repeated. A shared AST across all three generators removes that sunk cost.

Architecture

Scanner engine

The scanner uses memory-mapped I/O via Linux mmap with madvise(MADV_SEQUENTIAL) hints, eliminating kernel-space buffer copying and letting the OS prefetch pages ahead of the lexer. A hand-rolled state machine tokenizes ABAP without regex overhead. For parallel execution, files are sharded by byte offset rather than line count; each worker seeks to its offset and synchronizes on the first newline, avoiding an O(n) line-counting pass and keeping partitioning deterministic regardless of line-length variance.

MDM readiness assessment

The assessment applies advanced mathematical algorithms. Records are grouped using configurable business and geographic attributes and evaluated against configurable duplicate-risk thresholds. When those thresholds are exceeded, the accelerator produces an MDM-readiness assessment with counts and anonymized examples. It indicates whether a separate MDM workstream may be required; the accelerator does not implement or deliver MDM.

Code generation

Three target formats share one AST, so no output type requires re-parsing:

• SQLScript — HANA-optimized stored procedures with UPSERT, MERGE, and TRUNCATE logic for direct database execution.
• CDS + ABAP — Core Data Services views with @AbapCatalog annotations and ABAP behavior definitions for custom development and Fiori enablement.
• Migration Cockpit — JSON mapping specifications compatible with SAP's standard Migration Cockpit object templates.

Interface

A browser-based operator interface presents one primary action per screen across four stages: ingest, mapping, format selection, and execution. Simplification-list guardrails run at this layer: forbidden mappings are blocked in real time with the governing rule cited, and prerequisites (for example, Business Partner conversion) are surfaced before execution.

Deployment model

The engine deploys as a self-contained binary plus a browser-based interface on a single customer-controlled Linux server. SAP access is read-only (RFC metadata extraction) or fully offline (file upload). No network egress is required for operation. Configuration is INI-driven; credentials are supplied via environment variables. See Security & deployment for the full posture.

About Pacific Data Integrators

PDI is an enterprise data management consultancy with 15+ years of delivery and 100+ implementations across Informatica, Salesforce, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Snowflake, and Databricks. The accelerator is a PDI product.